When is it time for a dental implant?

When do you need a dental implant? When your dentist says so—I hope he/she’s a good one! 🙂 Due to the prohibitive costs of dental implants, patients are often mistrusting when their dentists advise them to undergo tooth replacement surgery.

There are some cases when the dentists themselves are not fully confident whether to advise implant treatment. Many a time, we get patients with recurrent tooth decay, i.e. a tooth with a crown on it decays again. In such cases, when we take off the tooth cap, we find that endodontic treatment (tooth restoration) such as root canal is required. However, even after root canal treatment is performed, there wouldn’t be much of the tooth left. The same tooth would probably decay again but the dentist might not want to cut the adjacent teeth to put a dental bridge.

This is the right time to extract the tooth and place an implant.

Whenever a tooth is removed for any reason, the empty socket and the surrounding areas undergo ridge resorption, i.e. loss of tissue. There is no way to stop this process other than an immediate dental implant. We at Bhalla dental clinic are extremely careful to make sure the tooth extraction is atraumatic, painless and preserves jaw bone. Accurate implant placement is necessary so that the new tooth stays within the contours of the ridge. This makes for proper bone re-growth after grafting.